Malkin: Notes on the coming meat shortage

Wednesday

Apr 29, 2020 at 3:02 PM

The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 2020 has come to end, but don't breathe a sigh of relief just yet. The Spring Meat Stampede is here.

At my local Costco in Colorado Springs on Monday, fresh chicken breast was nowhere to be found. Nationwide, bacon prices doubled. Wholesale pork prices for ham, ribs and loins rose between 12% and 32% over the last seven days. COVID-19 outbreaks among the nation's major meat processing plants have shut down nearly 20% of the country's fresh pork production. Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods has shuttered five facilities so far because of sick and no-show workers; Tyson Foods warns "the food supply is breaking" and "millions of pounds of meat will disappear" by May 1 after the mega-corporation idled its largest pork plant in Iowa, a beef plant in Washington state and another meatpacking facility in Indiana.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to compel the nation's biggest meat processors to stay open and stave off shortages. How exactly the feds will "address liability issues" (which Tyson Foods execs complained about to Trump) and force union leaders to comply remains unclear. Whether the order actually heads off mass hysteria is also iffy. As we saw with the toilet paper rush, Chicken Little-ism is contagious. Warnings about shortages induce shortages. Admonitions of "Don't hoard the Charmin" failed in the face of mob behavior. Same with "Don't hoard the hocks."

With meat prices rising, the economic landscape looks bleak. While gas is less than $2 a gallon, much of the nation is still locked down and off the streets, out of the cars and in no hurry to get on planes or trains. The latest Consumer Price Index summary reveals rising rent prices and costs of medical care services on top of spiking meat prices. With nearly 26 million Americans now out of work, signs of impending stagflation loom. That "V-shaped recovery" is more like a "P.D." recovery: Pipe Dream.

More candor from all the Beltway "experts" about what we face would be helpful to our suffering citizenry. While we're at it, this nation must confront the dangers of dependency on the globalized, homogenized methods of producing meat and other key products in our food supply, which is concentrated in the hands of a quarter of giant multinational corporations who press for unlimited alien workers in exchange for low food prices. An estimated 30% of America's meat production employees are foreign-born. As usual, "Open Borders Inc." reaps all the benefits while we're left holding an empty grocery bag.

Let's remember: Tyson Foods was embroiled in an illegal immigrant smuggling racket two decades ago. The company has paid Swamp lobbyists like Republican Ed Gillespie millions of dollars to push for illegal immigrant amnesty. And Big Meat coordinates with refugee resettlement racketeers to import tens of thousands of cheap laborers from Asia, Africa and Latin America into the heartland.

Just one example: Tyson fundamentally transformed Waterloo, Iowa, by working with faith-based government contractors to ship in thousands of low-wage Burmese refugees to fill jobs at the meat plant now at the center of a coronavirus outbreak. Since 2002, 9,143 refugees from 37 countries have resettled in Iowa (which doesn't include so-called secondary migration, or friends and relatives moving to Iowa from their primary settlement location). Taxpayer-subsidized Catholic Charities, Lutheran Services and the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants have reaped millions dumping them across Central Iowa -- and abandoning them in cultural, linguistic and economic ghettos at the mercy of exploitative employers.

A decentralized system of meat and poultry production would enhance food security, national security and public health. Demographic conquest fueled by big business' insatiable appetite for cheap labor, by contrast, is making us sick to our stomachs in more ways than one.